


Studio Space

by thesnadger



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Art School, Gen, Graphic Depiction of Rainbows, I submit Sock Opera as my evidence, Post-Finale, The Power Of Mabel, Trauma Recovery, if anyone thinks its unrealistic for Mabel to do all this in a couple weeks, that girl has supernatural time management skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 19:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8258150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesnadger/pseuds/thesnadger
Summary: It's the future. Mabel's older, possibly wiser and away at college when she gets an assignment that sends her back to the summer of 2012.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to Scribefindegil for betaing!

It's the future.

Somewhere in California, there's a girl sitting in a painting studio. She's finishing the first semester of her second year at art school. Maybe it's the art school in California that you're thinking of. Maybe it's not. It isn't important.

The girl's name isn't important, either. Or maybe it is. Maybe everyone's name is important. Either way, her name is Aysha, and she is friends with Mabel Pines.

Lots of people are friends with Mabel the way that Aysha is. She isn't Mabel's closest friend, or even her second closest or third. Sometimes they eat lunch together, and sometimes they work together in the studio and talk and play loud music and laugh, and it's nice. She's gotten to know her a little, but most of Mabel is still a mystery to her.

She knows that Mabel loves sprinkles and 80's music and Crayon D'Ache pencils, that she can't control the volume of her voice or her laughter and that she has strong opinions on hot chocolate. She knows Mabel has a pet pig back home and will, at the slightest hint of skepticism that she actually owns a pig, immediately pull up two and a half gigabytes of photo evidence. She knows she hugs way too hard and way too fast, she'll hug someone the first time she meets them without fear or shame, and it's hard not to love her for that.

But she doesn't really know anything about her life. Anything about where she grew up, what her childhood was like. It wasn't until last week that she even learned that Mabel had a twin brother.

Right now, Aysha is sitting just a few feet away from Mabel, but she isn't looking at her. Like everyone else, she's looking at the back of the studio. The teacher is standing there with a dozen sophomores circled around her, sitting on wooden blocks, clay-covered cushions and whatever other seating they can find.

“For the final crit, I thought I'd give you something open-ended.” The teacher says. “I want you all to design your idea of a perfect world. Your ideal place to live in. And then, I want you to paint a window into it.”

Aysha nods. Like everyone, she's eager to paint something more interesting than buildings around campus and nude models (the novelty of drawing naked people wore off after the hundredth time she tried and failed to get the proportions of the torso right.) She looks around at her classmates. Some are eager, some sullen and tired, some are whispering to one another...and then there's Mabel, sitting rigid in her chair. She looks like she's going to throw up.

No one else seems to notice.

Aysha considers asking her if anything's wrong, but when the class ends Mabel is halfway to the door before anyone else has even collected their things. She doesn't join her friends for lunch after class like she usually does. Instead, she runs (literally runs—that girl can clear half the campus in a blink of an eye) back to the dorms alone. Later, Aysha hears that her roommate came home to find her and her laptop wrapped in a blanket, on a skype call with her brother and with half eaten bars of bitter chocolate all around her.

“She hates dark chocolate.” The roommate tells Aysha, concern in her voice. “This was, like, the 70% cocoa stuff. And she'd used my coffee maker to make _black_ coffee. She never takes it without a ton of sugar and whipped cream. When I asked about it, she just said, 'I want stuff to taste bad right now.' She looked like she'd been crying.”

It's hard to get a hold of Mabel for a few days after that. She always seems to be running from one place to another. To and from classes, to the studio, to the dorms. Or back to her car to make another trip into town. Senors are the only ones allowed private studio space but somehow, _somehow_ she talks or bribes or charms one of them into letting her use his. The first thing she does is pin an old bedsheet up between the wooden supports closing it in, completely hiding what she's working on from the outside world.

When Aysha asks Mabel what she's working on back there, Mabel just wiggles her fingers dramatically and insists it's “top-secret.”

For the remainder of the term, Mabel spends all her time in the studio. Aysha never peeks behind the bedsheet, but she watches as Mabel carries more and more supplies inside. Florescent acrylics, metallic spray paint, skeins of yarn, buckets of craft supplies, all of it vanishes behind the sheet. Aysha comes in to the studio in the morning to work on her own painting—a memory of her childhood home—and there's the sound of off-key singing coming from Mabel's corner. She leaves in the evening and Mabel's still there, plugging away, only poking her head out now and then to ask if she's being too loud.

It's a little strange, seeing someone as social as Mabel hole up in her own little corner for so long, but then again, she doesn't really _seem_ alone. She always seems to be talking to someone. Sometimes Aysha hears a muffled, distorted voice—like someone talking through a Skype call. Often it's a male voice that she assumes is Mabel's brother. But she also hears other voices, male, female, old and young, sometimes multiple people talking at once. Long conversations or just the occasional comment as music plays in the background.

Usually Aysha only hears half a conversation, as if Mabel's talking on the phone.

“No...no, I still want to finish it,” the voice comes from behind the bedsheet while Aysha's setting up at an easel. “I don't know, it's just important to me somehow. Uh huh. No, I will. Oh my gosh, are _you_ seriously telling _me_ not to work too hard, you hypocrite?”

“I have an idea about that.” Mabel says the next day, while Aysha is scraping her palette. “Candy and Grenda say they can get me some, they're sending a jar over in one of Mr. McGucket's drones.”

“...It's just not fair, you know?” Aysha is sure she hears a sniffle, senses tears in Mabel's voice, and she feels guilty for listening but the studio is almost empty and Mabel talks so loudly, as if she doesn't care who hears. “I thought I dealt with all this stuff in high school. I thought I got over it all, but it just came flooding back.”

“Yeah...yeah, exactly.” It's late at night and Aysha only came in to get a book she'd forgotten, but Mabel's still here, still talking. “No...that's okay. I mean, I always love to see you girls, but you've got finals too, and besides, I'd rather you come visit when I'm not so busy so we can have more fun together. I promise I'll be okay. Just...it's okay if I call if I have another dream, right?”

“Okay...that actually kind of makes sense. Yeah. I'll try that.” A sniffle, then laughter mixed with occasional whimpers. “Stop it! I know you're just trying to make me laugh so I'll stop crying....”

The last weeks of school fly by. It's not just Mabel who's busy with finals, after all. The last critique ends up being split up over three days. Aysha's piece is done on day one—the reaction is mostly positive, which is a relief. Mabel's critique is on day three, and miraculously she shows up to class with makeup on, with her hair brushed and pulled back in a headband, looking like she got a full night's sleep.

The class gathers around the bedsheets pulled over Mabel's corner. Aysha gets as close as she dares, curiosity burning behind her eyes.

“So, uh. It only occurred to me like, yesterday, that we've been doing oils all semester and I didn't even ask if mixed media was okay. But uh...” she waves her hands and makes an exaggerated shrug. “Toooo late now, right?”

She reaches up and pulls the sheet down. More than one person gasps.

It's a triptych. Three canvases, each one taller than her. A wide one in the middle and two thinner ones on each side. Put together, they form a picture of...of something surreal. Something beautiful and mad and so bright and colorful it hurts Aysha's eyes to look at it.

She's painted some kind of bizarre fairyland, with a rainbow colored sky, hills made out of sweaters and heaps of stuffed animals. Trees that grow stickers and buildings made of colored sand and candy dots. The streets and sidewalks are full of weird little creatures—a pony head on a skateboard, a flying hamburger with eyes, a swan made out of hair... Aysha is pretty sure she recognizes a few of them from cartoons from her childhood, but a lot of them seemed too bizarre to ever be on a children's cartoon.

It's a painting, but it's not. Aysha can see yarn carefully cut and laid across the canvas, glued down or fixed in place with wax and clogged with paint, forming hills and houses and vines dangling from trees. There's at least three types of glitter that she can pick out, cut paper and sequins and shapes made out of foam, spray paint and acrylic and swirls of colorful wax with bits of paper still in them so that Aysha can tell they're melted crayons. Aysha peers closer at the design on a puppy's sweater. Did Mabel actually embroider _directly onto the canvas?_ It should be a mess, but somehow she's managed to make it feel like a unified whole.

How did she do this in just a couple of weeks? This is the kind of project that takes a whole semester, at least.

There's a quiet murmur before the teacher asks. “Who wants to start?”

“It's very...um...cartoony. Like, on purpose, obviously.” A person near Aysha says.

“It's really cluttered, but like, in a good way.” Someone says, “I feel completely overwhelmed looking at it. It reminds me of _The Garden of Earthly Delights._ Is that on purpose? With the shape of the panels and all?”

Mabel nods.

“How did you get that sheen on the rainbows?” Someone else asks. “It's like nothing I've ever seen.”

“Unicorn tears.” Mabel replies, completely deadpan. “Mixed with gel medium.”

Everyone laughs. Mabel smiles, but doesn't laugh with them.

“There's so much going on, I keep looking at it again and again and finding more hidden figures or little scenes....”

“It's very ambitious.” the teacher agrees. “I appreciate how fearlessly you experimented with so many different materials, and I think you could push that even farther. Will you be taking Mixed Media studio next year? I'd love to see you put this concept into a sculpture.”

“I dunno, it looks kitschy to me.” Todd says, “I look at it and see a lot of things that I guess are supposed to be cute, but just feel very straightforward and commercialized to me.” Aysha frowns, but Todd never has anything good to say about anything. Mabel doesn't seem bothered by him.

“I'm not even sure what I'm looking at,” one girl says, grinning, “but it makes me so happy! It's just so _you,_ Mabel! _”_

They praise the level of detail and the scale. They bring up pop surrealism and the Superflats and Kawaisa culture, they compare it to Takashi Murakami and Ron English and Jessica Stockholder to prove they know who those people are. But Aysha is the first to notice that there are parts that aren't so happy, that there are cracks in the colorful surface.

“...Look at that buff bunny-man standing by the river.” She says. “...He's smiling. But his reflection in the water isn't. ...And over here, there's a girl doing her makeup in a mirror, but her reflection looks sad.”

A bright sheen comes to Mabel's eyes when she says that, and her jaw sets with satisfaction.

“...You're right.” A girl said. “I didn't even notice.”

“Now that you point that out, it's kind of ominous how red the corners of the sky are.” Someone else added.

From there, people can't _stop_ finding grim little details. They suddenly see how the reflections never smile. How the the colors vibrate painfully here and there. How creepy it is that everyone's eyes have those elongated, slit-like pupils. How almost everything seems to be multicolored except the yarn—all of it is one shade of deep, rich pink, almost red, and it winds and twists through everything, knotting and tangling and hanging from trees and buildings in a way that feels strangely sinister.

Through it all Mabel stands silently. Radiating a quiet sense of victory. Finally, the teacher turns to her.

“All right...we've all had our chance to critique it. Is there anything you want to say about this piece before we move on?”

“Phew. Well.” Mabel takes a deep breath. “Basically, I created this place when I was a kid. It was supposed to be a perfect world, where everyone was happy. A place that gave you everything you wanted even before you knew that you wanted it. A place where nothing bad ever happened.” She shrugs. “It was a lie. I knew it was a lie from the beginning, you know? But I still wanted to pretend. Because what was so great about the truth, anyway? Wasn't a lie that made you happy so much better than a reality that made you cry? And I sort of got stuck there for a while...

“Mentally stuck?” the teacher asks. “Just wrapped up in your own fantasy world?”

“Something like that. I guess I was afraid of growing up.” Mabel says. “And y'know, I got past that, thanks to my brother. But....” She reaches up and fiddles with the star-shaped pendant around her neck. “...The thing is...sometimes I really miss it. I miss the lie. Because real life is so _hard_ sometimes. And it _hurts_ sometimes. You don't get to do all the things you want to do. There's problems in the world you can't fix. People make fun of you and hurt you...some of them won't ever like you and there's nothing you can do about it. People you love get hurt, or sick, or sad. And sometimes even when they aren't any of those things you're so _worried_ about them getting hurt that you can't think of anything else. And sometimes you feel deep down like...the world shouldn't _be_ like this. It should be happy and cuddly and fun all the time. Like this place.

“But the thing about this place is...it was only ever one thing. It was just me. And it wasn't even _all_ of me. It was just the parts I wanted to see and wanted to feel. And I don't want a world that's just that. I want _everyone_ to be part of my world. My brother and his paranoia, my family and their weirdness, all of my friends and all the stories they have. Even the sad stories, even the ones that hurt my heart and make me bake a zillion mug cakes for them because I don't know what else to do to make it better. I want reality. Because that's where everyone I love is. Everyone who makes me brave enough to want to face the bad parts.”

The critique ends. They won't know what their grades are for another few days, but that doesn't matter. The others leave, but Aysha's still sitting in the studio, perching on some long-gone sculpture student's half-finished work and staring at Mabel's triptych.

Mabel's doing the same. Standing back and looking at her own painting. It's a long while before she turns and squeaks, surprised to see that she isn't alone.

“Oh! Hey! Didn't see you there.” she says.

“Sorry. Hi.” Aysha smiles. “I just can't stop looking at it. You did really well.”

“Thanks. I'm pretty proud of it.” She looks at the paint still on her hands for a long moment, then looks up and smiles. “I liked your painting too! It was so sweet and nostalgic, and you did such a good job on the brickwork.”

“Thanks...” Aysha reaches down to pick up her bag. “So, now that it's finished, are you actually free for lunch today?”

“Yeah, you bet. Just give me a second....”

Mabel carefully hangs the bedsheet back up, gathers up her supplies and turns.

“Okay, I'm ready!” she says.

The two of them walk to the studio door. Mabel pauses on the way out, turning to glance back at the covered art.

“I'm going to take it home over break.” She says, unprompted. “And I'm gonna look at it some more. I'm going to keep looking and looking at it until I don't need to look at it anymore. And then I'm going to burn it.”

She turns with a satisfied smile back towards the door and walks out. Aysha follows. They leave the heavy paint-smell of the studio behind and walk out into the sun.


End file.
